The adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) tools by financial advisers has risen from 43% to 74% in a year, according to Intelliflo’s 2026 UK Advice Efficiency report.
Adviser firms are applying AI to manual administrative work, with note-taking and transcription the most common application (87%), followed by report writing (44%).
Despite the increasing adoption of AI, digital aspiration outpaced execution.
Three in five (62%) of advisers said they wanted near-complete digital workflows (81%-100% digital), yet under half (48%) had minimised the use of paper to under 20%. However this was an improvement on the 43% of advisers who had achieved this in 2025.
Top priorities for digitisation were system integration (51%), digital signatures (50%) and online fact-finding (48%).
The survey also asked advice professionals to rate how efficient they believed current financial advice journey workflows were on a scale of one to ten, with one being not at all efficient and ten being extremely efficient.
The average efficiency rating for 2026 was 6.23 out of 10, with only a quarter (25%) of advisers rating their workflows as highly efficient (8+).
Three-quarters (75%) of advisers told Intelliflo their current processes limited their ability to deliver good client outcomes to some degree, reflecting the gap between firms' digital aspirations and operational reality.
Report writing was still the administrative task consuming most adviser time, according to the survey of 209 advisers. A third (30%) of advisers said they spent three or more hours per report, with one in ten (10%) spending over five hours on each report.
Fragmented systems also remained a considerable operational problem. Three in five (60%) of firms were still running five or more core systems, with 57% running four of more investment platforms.
Almost three quarters (68%) of the advisers surveyed cited manual data entry as their biggest challenge, with 63% reporting poor system integration. Almost two-fifths (38%) saw data errors in 11 or more out of every 100 client cases, affecting service quality and increasing compliance risk.
When asked what they would do if more streamlined processes freed up more of their time, advisers said they would serve more clients (66%), focus on business development (47%) or move to a four-day working week (17%).
• Intelliflo’s 2026 UK Advice Efficiency report surveyed 209 UK financial advisers in April.